Editorial Gets Attention of Growth Energy

Hoosier Ag Today
02/13/2011
NAFB News Service

An editorial published in the Washington Post has brought reaction from Growth Energy, the coalition of U.S. ethanol supporters. In his editorial, Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University and a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, pointed to a multitude of reasons why food prices could go higher. He pointed to the weather, feeding a world population including rising meat consumption in China, long-term underinvestment in agricultural research and increasing demand for ethanol.

Searchinger proclaimed, - the market is out of equilibrium. Biofuels have grown rapidly now consuming more than 6.5 percent of grain and 8 percent of vegetable oil last year. But he says, - relief is possible if we can just limit biofuel growth. At the same time Europe must rethink its mandates and the Obama administration needs to focus on fuel sources that do not compete with food, such as garbage and crop residues, and not grasses grown on good cropland.

Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy, says - ethanol is both a food and a fuel business. What is ignored in this piece is that every ethanol plant in the country turns out animal feed as well as fuel – we only take the starch out of the corn kernel but put all the protein, fiber and oils right back into the food supply as ‘dried distillers grains.’ Even then, ethanol’s use of the global grain supply is a fraction.

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